Things your new PC does NOT need

PCIe - This AGPx16 was just way too slow.
DDR2 - This Ram is like ... slow, but hell - it's new!
shader 3.0 - Imagine, those stupid ATI card users do not have this!
64bit CPU - It's like ... err ... the double of 32!
ATX 2.0 - Forget 20 pins. Go for 24 pins!
SLI - Real men need at least two GPUs...
BTX - It's not like they just turned the mainboard around...
24 bit audio - I think my mp3s will just sound way better with it.
GigabiteLAN - Imagine: highspeed Internet and gaming!
SATA for your 7200rpm HD.
SATA for your "optical drives".
SATA2.
At least 10 USB ports.
Nforce4, with a small fan.

Zeropaid.com - RISE EXEEM!: "start the new generation of p2p software."

Geeknews.net - Tsunami Satellite Images Hi-Res - Before and After the Destruction

Gizmodo : Digimaster SD Card with USB Interface

Spanish deploy CAD in the name of God | The Register

The Movie Blog - Dictionary Definition of Ignorance: "MPAA"

Michael's Minutes - Open Bid For Netherlands Government (Or how to save 150 million euros) So the dutch administration wants 260,000 desktops software. Linspire costs 5,915,000 euros. Microsoft's is 156,000,000 euros. Quite a difference!!!

PSP: PSP Obtained

Miranda IM v0.4 RC 1 Release Announcement I am using it and works better with MSN

Why Nerds Are Unpopular : "If you're too cool for school, you're probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships. [...] It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity is a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation."

Slashdot | Firefox Users Bad For Advertisers: "during the months of October and November, Internet Explorer users were more than four times as likely to click on ads than Firefox users were."

AnandTech: A Guide to Choosing the Right 19" LCD Monitor - 7 Models Reviewed

Zeropaid.com - P2P here to stay: Music companies must get real "The international music recording companies are spending millions of dollars in legal fees these days. Their target - the online file swapping business that is allowing consumers around the world to avoid buying CDs by downloading songs and even complete albums for next to nothing. But the aggressive tactics of the record companies' lobby group, the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and its US counterpart in trying to close down file swapping of music seem doomed to failure. Until the music recording industry comes to grip with the fact that its product is too expensive, the file swappers - P2P traffic as it is called - will grow their market."

Slashdot | In Korea, Email Is Only For Old People

TCS: Tech Central Station - The Faith-Based Encyclopedia: "To see what Wikipedia is like I chose a single article, the biography of Alexander Hamilton. [...] this article has been 'edited' over 150 times. [...] Contrary to the faith, the article has, in fact, been edited into mediocrity."

Slashdot | Former Turkish DMOZ Editor Draws 10 Months In Jail: "H. Ertas, a Turkish editor of the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) has been sentenced to 10 months in prison after being found guilty of editing a category about the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK)."

Where do you want to go, Aiden? "The whole thing about “free software” is a lie. It’s a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software."

How To Steal Wi-Fi - And how to keep the neighbors from stealing yours. By Paul Boutin

Slashdot | Ballmer Threatens Linux Patent Lawsuits "Today Microsoft warned several Asian countries that using Linux could subject them to lawsuits, claiming that Linux violates '228 patents'. Apparently, Steve Ballmer believes he can enforce U.S. law in Asia."

Spode's Abode - SATA and PATA Hard Drive Group Test (15)

Spode's Abode - SATA and PATA Hard Drive Group Test (15)

Windows Media Player sound files 'edited with warez' | The Register

Defendant: Microsoft source code sale was a setup | The Register

Respecting IP law frustrates makers of DVD players in China - CD Freaks.com

Mozilla readies Firefox 1.0 release | CNET News.com: "After 19 months of development, two name changes and more than 8 million downloads of its preview release, the Firefox browser is finally turning 1.0."

State IQ vs Income vs Politics, ok previous post was a joke.

US Election 2004, results listed by average IQ, states with higher IQ voted Kerry, states with lowest voted Bush.

AnandTech: "A few months ago I put Dothan (90nm Pentium M) to the test and compared it to an equivalently clocked Athlon 64 and a high-end Pentium 4. In general application performance, a 2GHz Pentium M actually outperformed the desktop chips and even in gaming and workstation applications the Pentium M was competitive, all while running at significantly lower temperatures with much lower power requirements."

Legit Reviews - Modding: Single-Layer to Dual-Layer

How organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush | The Register: "Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and California have the highest broadband penetration and all went to Kerry. Meanwhile, Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico have the lowest penetration and all went to Bush."

Lawrence Lessig: "today, politics is religion — and neither are to be discussed among people who disagree."

NewsForge | Getting started with OpenOffice.org macros

100,000 civilians may have died in Iraq conflict

Dave Winer: Blame us for believing that our President wouldn't unilaterally go to war based on a lie. That's criminal. He should go to jail.

Xbox owner sues over dud drive | CNET News.com: "A video game fan upset over a failed disc drive in his Xbox video game console has sued Microsoft on behalf of all Xbox owners across the United States." That's America! :P

Lawrence Lessig: George Bush has apparently endorsed John Kerry for President, advising America that we don’t want as commander in chief “a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts.”

iPod socks, Apple starts doing useless stuff.

Study finds noise-isolating outperforms cancelling headphones - CD Freaks.com

Slashdot | Amazing Things Your Automobile Can't Do "nifty automobile technology that isn't coming to the United States. The report suggests that legal liability is a significant reason for not offering various driver-distracting options in the U.S."

Linux Times : An Online Linux Magazine - Linus Torvalds: ''Desktop Market has already started'': "And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your 'vision' too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done. "

Kazaa loses its #1 spot to eDonkey/Overnet P2P network - CD Freaks.com: "Probably the biggest mistake for the music industry was to shutdown the original Napster file sharing network. A better alternative would be to have gradually made Napster into a legal service." And this was a no-brainer for everyone but RIAA.

Microsoft advised to learn to love Linux - ZDNet UK News: "Christensen said that Microsoft should move progressively into Linux applications over the next six or seven years, because that sector will offer better opportunities for growth than operating systems or databases. He suggested that Microsoft acquire Research In Motion to accelerate the move, rather than continue to invest in making Windows run better on handheld devices."

Wal-Mart to RIAA: We're not gonna take it!: "Now, the retailer is tired of losing money on CDs, and has told the music industry to lower prices, or else. Wal-Mart is looking to sell CDs for under $10 (still a rip-off in a world of $15 DVDs), and still make a profit. [..] While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart's total sales."

SilenceAir: Noise Blocking Bricks: by Meta-Efficient, leave the noise outside the window

CBS News | Bush's Top Ten Flip-Flops

So what’s new? Absolutely nothing really At the end of the day we can only reach the conclusion that a ’01 or ’02 PC is still running fine in 2004, and only needs a graphics upgrade to be able to play all current games fluently, for all other tasks it has enough computing power to get the job done. Who would’ve thought that in ’01? Keep that in mind when you’re about to ‘upgrade’ to a new PC, most of the products that are currently for sale will not significantly enhance your computing experience.

Microsoft Sees Open-Source Threat Looming Ever Larger

Free Windows doesn't stop Linux rush Windows is 'free' in Iran, but even there is an increasing move towards Linux, according to an AFP report.

Labels, Microsoft in talks on CD copying | CNET News.com, which will be a good way to move users to Linux.

Wired News: U.S. Exports DMCA Down Under: "Australia appears ready to adopt U.S-style copyright laws"

The New York Times > Arts > Music > Critic's Notebook: No Fears: Laptop D.J.'s Have a Feast: "While the recording business litigates and lobbies over music being given away online, countless musicians are taking advantage of the Internet to get their music heard. They are betting that if they give away a song or two, they will build audiences, promote live shows and sell more recordings."

Should I Rip This? - The Peer-to-Peer Weblog

Philadelphia is considering adding WiFi boxes to all street lights

Taking a look at the Rio Carbon - Engadget

zillion photos of republican convention

Apple - iMac G5 I wonder where Apple sees the "Techonlogy Democratized" with a price tag of $1300

Wired News: Cops Put Brakes on Bike Protest: "Joshua Kinberg, the 25-year-old creator of Bikes Against Bush, was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and criminal possession of graffiti instruments". wohoo! they finally found those WMD!! ;)

The Engadget Interview: Jack Valenti (Engadget) One of the questions: "What would you say to a mom who wants to make a backup of her kids’ DVD movies? When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn’t give you two backup copies. Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever."

well this guy is misleading us, or he doesn't realise that a dvd is a whole lot different than a cognac glass?

or does a Cognac glass have intellectual property?

I can buy 10 glasses, but who buys 10 dvds of Spiderman2?

I can do whatever I want with the cognac glass, but MPAA doesn't want me to do what I want with the dvd (copy it for example).

Op Ed: How Long Can the Country Stay Scared?

Open Source Myths - by Neil Gunton

Rio Carbon (5GB) - video review

Justice Dept. Cracks Down Internet Crime

Virtual girlfriend that behaves like a real one!!! ;)

One Swedish ISP's response to the MPAA

Wired News: A Site for Banner Ad Freaks

Does your website still use Tables?

drive densities doubled every three to four months with no end in sight!

The Realworld - MPAA Raids in Germany BERLIN -- At 5 a.m. the police kicked in the front door of the modest apartment house in working-class Essen. Guns drawn, they ordered an unsuspecting family out of bed. A few minutes later, they hauled away a 22-year-old college student as his stunned parents looked on in silence.

Wired%20News%3A%20Modern%20Students%20Devour%20Old%20Math

Slashdot | Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts?

Wired News: Internet Radio, Without Drudgery

BBC NEWS | Technology | Digital memories survive extremes: "The formats were CompactFlash, Secure Digital, xD, Memory Stick and Smartmedia.

Even some of the thinner cards that appear to be fragile fared well in the trial.

They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy."

Load Test Gmail, he filled his gmail account up to 1023MB.

ACLU - Pizza, what could happen if our personal data is not kept private

Seagate extends HDD warranties to five years | The Register

FBI confiscates “secret” hard drives

RealNetworks breaks Apple's hold on iPod | CNET News.com This means that songs bought in RealNetworks shop will play on Microsoft *and* Apple's devices

The New York Times > Movies > The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made

Linspire.com - News, nice parody of "Light My Fire" from The Doors (called "Run Lin Spire")

redemption in a blog: RSS feed integration in Firefox looks interesting, though I am not sure if it has to be part of Firefox. Well, I'll decide after using it a bit :) I just downloaded the nightly that can do this.

Bigger breasts offered as perk to US soldiers. 22/07/2004. ABC News Online "The United States Army has long lured recruits with the slogan "Be All You Can Be" but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on taxpayers' money."

What went wrong at Wright State when Napster arrived | The Register: "When the Napster music service arrives at Wright State University this fall, it will bring with it higher IT costs for everyone while delivering almost no gains to half of the student population.

[...]

Hernandez admits that one of the key motivators in signing up for the Napster service was protection from the RIAA and its lawsuit machine. By targeting college students with legal action, the RIAA has managed to force a number of schools to consider opening a Napster shop. Do the schools really care about solving the long-term problem of music piracy? Not really. They just want the lawyers to go away.

The students using Napster will not really learn much about the value of copyrights or compensating artists at all. That's because, when their four years are up, all of their tethered downloads will disappear. That's when they will have to pick between paying $10 per month for the rest of their music loving lives or finding a more practical way of obtaining music.

Commentary: Why Microsoft won't change, Swallowing companies works well.

I want my Tidy-Bot!, maybe I'd buy one Roomba, for US$300 is not that pricey

QUICKTIME MOVIE: iTunes-Pepsi ad remixed

Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse The letter Groucho Marx sent to Warner Bros when they wanted to make him change the title of his movie "A Night In Casablanca", that was back in 1945

so now amazon doesn't pay copyrights? that's funny, copyright holders want money, more money and.... more money.

Scientists horrified by Bush's Bad Science | The Register

Labels think 'Louder Is Better', but has it gone too far? - CD Freaks.com

PCWorld.com - Busting the Biggest PC Myths

Sinclair's A-Bike a folding bike.

Yeong Yang "Mars" YY-5603 mid-tower case :: SilentPCReview.com Good quality case in every aspect, what I liked most: it has the buttons and connectors on top, the position of hdds.

Here's the pilot episode of "Joey" a spin-off of "Friends"

Konica Minolta DiMage X50. I was close to buy a DiMage xg or a Sony T1, but now... I don't know what to do!

minolta


dpreview.

Digital Spy - Ten-disc 'Matrix' DVD boxset planned

BMG to introduce three class music CD system in Germany - CD Freaks.com

Maarten Steinkamp, head of BMG Germany: "We must finally become customer friendly and offer music fans a broad choice. The music industry has sat motionless on its backside for far too long,"

The "normal" version, with full cover and notes, will cost €12.99, down from the current average price of €16.99 and there will also be a luxury, often limited, edition priced at €17.99 that will have a DVD component and remixes as extras.

NPD Group: Music CD prices are falling at an increased rate - CD Freaks.com

NewsForge | Linux users are spoiled: "I swear, by the time you buy or download all the software it takes to actually do something with Windows, you might as well install Linux."

TECH TIME: 50 Coolest Websites: Complete List

Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite "Think the web browser wars are over? Think again. World War I was dubbed “The Great War" and "The War To End All Wars.” Alas, that was an optimistic prediction; WWII followed in short order. The browser wars are coming back, and this time the whole World Wide Web is at risk, not just a few browsers and their vendors."

The Spoof - Britney hires person to fasten her bra

Professors find RIAA Lawsuits ineffective with further research - CD Freaks.com: "After all the RIAA's effort on filing lawsuits currently totalling over 3,000 and the approval of the Pirate Act, there is more and more research aiming to prove that file sharing is not the culprit. Video games and DVDs which are widely available on P2P networks are still selling very well with DVD sales still on the rise. Also, many industries suffered significant decline following the Sept. 11 economy decline.



Now the recording industry claims its lawsuits are finally paying off after US CD sales have risen by 10.6% in the 1st quarter 2004 from last year. However music downloads are also back on the rise, up 5 million to a total of 23 million over the same period. This indicates that CD sales seem to depend on how well file sharing is doing, thus contradicting what the music industry claims."

Bush Sees Priority as Popularity at Home, Not Europe: "My job is to do my job." says Bush. Another sentence for history.

Firefox 0.9! No, wait, 0.9.1! (aka Lessons learned?) - MozillaZine Forums "So, here's the question : WAS IT WORTH rushing 0.9 with a puny RC just 5 (FIVE!) days before? Did it do a lot of good to have 0.9 included on the CD with Moz 1.7 just to have users forced to download 0.9.1 a couple of weeks later? With all the hype surrounding Firefox (as a poster child of OSS and IE slayer), that 0.9 did way more harm to Firefox image than 0.9 did good as a release!" in other words, don't use 0.9 wait for 0.9.1

AOL quits enterprise IM game | CNET News.com "AOL's move out of enterprise IM underscores the lack of success the company, and its rivals, achieved in luring businesses to pay for software that many workers were already using for free." that's internet! free(dom) wins!

Incredibly interesting speech for Microsoft about DRM. It's terribly long, some pices are copied below:


"we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law: 'any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it.' This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you."

"In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and
Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD.
She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say,
Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm
called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler."

"It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the
records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much
innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players?
They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and
amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR?"

Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry,
told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film
industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it
determined that any device capable of a substantial
non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this
Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive
the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get
another business-model or go broke."

At the heyday of Napster, record
execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that
Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.

Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that
Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it,
they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could
hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them
and made the product they thought their customers wanted.

When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone
companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just
writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that
phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad
for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the extortionate
ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that
just because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should
expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player,
and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to
expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about
alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning?
Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market?

Tom's Hardware Guide Mass Storage: Seagate Set to Launch a Dozen New Disk Drives in Q3 - Seagate Attacks With 12 New Disk Drive Products

Ars Technica: USB 2.0 Hi-Speed drive review - Page 1 - (6/2003) review of 8 flash drives (or pen drives or usb drives, whatever)

SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Time to Dump Internet Explorer: "IE is a buggy, insecure, dangerous piece of software, and the source of many of the headaches that security pros have to endure"

Robert Moore: Entertainment industry killed my company - CD Freaks.com well, that's sad :(

What's this Gmail? - Guide - Short-Media

Slashdot | Microsoft Plans To Sell Anti-Virus Software

"If you are like most PC users, you may feel that your PC is slow or unstable. You can't run many applications or your PC will slow down. Or you have to reboot frequently due to crashes or application freezes. This page (link) contains all the secrets to making your computer fast and stable in minutes! No computer industry insider would want you to know this (link), as they will have a hard time trying to persuade you to upgrade your system to the next Windows Software or expensive hardware upgrade." I didn't expect this kind of messages from www.lockergnome.com Will they sell me Viagra next time?

Yahoo! storage goes negative | The Register: "We give you email, you give us storage space"

Firefox - The Browser, Reloaded v0.9 released. Great browser (If it wasn't for the crappy new theme included in this release.....)

eBay item 8111352149 (Ends Jun-21-04 08:59:27 PDT) - TONS JAPANESE VIDEO GAME COLLECTION FOR SALE PS2 XBOX.. super auction in eBay of many videogames consoles, take a look at the photos!!

Virgin King Branson Drives Car Across English Channel, I only blog it because of the funny paragraph comparing british vs american billionaires.

Italian gov text spams entire country | The Register Berlusconi learnt the lesson from Aznar, cell phones *are* important.

Pretec 12 GB CF - just $14,900: Digital Photography Review exactly what I needed :)

The Complete Edition of Murphy's Laws

AMD: An apology very funny

Regarding RSS reader evangelism [Scribbling.net] this guy is terribly wrong. I discovered RSS in dailyrotation.com and now I am aggregating content with bloglines.com RSS is just wonderful and great for average user.

Dave Winer "ubiquitous white-on-orange XML buttons"

Microsoft delivers 'the Facts' about Linux | The Register "Nick Barley, business and marketing director of Microsoft UK, said the "tabloid view" is that the battle between Microsoft and Linux is a struggle between "the free world and a big monopolist run by the richest man in the world"." yeah, that struggle is a fact ;)

Microsoft feels price squeeze from Linux "Microsoft Director Marketing Nick Barley has admitted that their customers are increasingly using the tactic of dropping the L-word in their dealings with Microsoft."

GrepLaw | Lindows Gives Up "Lindows threw in the towel, not because they lost any court case, they have won at every turn, but because Microsoft has brought so many lawsuits in so many foreign jurisdictions that Lindows simply can't afford to defend them all. [...] If that doesn't provide an argument for some sort of binding international IP arbitration regime, I don't know what does."

GRAND THEFT AMERICA

Britney Spears spelling correction at Google, or different ways to spell her name.

The Free & The Unfree - The P2P Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com interesting article on IP.

Some facts I read there: 60% of genome patents are hold by US, 50% of soybean grown worldwide is GM (genetically modified).

It focus on four industries: Media, Medicine, Agriculture and Software.

Optical Camouflage, amazing!!!!!!!!!

In Brazil, Microsoft decries Linux use | CNET News.com

"I don't know if this is the best way to attract investment into the country," the executive said. "I know this is not the best way to create a base of development from which to export because there's no revenue from something free."

Why the FCC should die | Perspectives | CNET News.com "Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it's not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good."

Reason: Database Nation: The upside of "zero privacy", long and interesting article on how databases leave you without privacy and how you benefit from that.

Emergent cheese-sandwich detector enlisted in War on Terror | The Register: "It's very bad luck for USA Today that on the very same day they reported the profound failing of the FBI's digital and computer analysis systems in the Madrid bombings, they published a column suggesting that just such technologies could prevent such attacks in future."

RIAA wants your fingerprints | The Register, incredible. They are worse than comunists (comunism wants to control everything, capitalism doesn't)

Interview with Ben Goodger (chief developer of Firefox)

Nokia's 3220 Airtexter I like this phone!

Linux News: Open Source: The Penguin That Ate Microsoft: "open-source software generally requires less computing power, a factor that its proponents suggest could be especially important because a new version of Windows slated for release in 2006 will be beyond the capacity of many older computers."

Zeropaid.com - Harry Potter and the wizard idea to foil cinema pirates (UK): "Surreptitious recording from cinema seats, sometimes interrupted by the head of the person in front shifting and blocking the action, has become a serious menace, according to the industry." Now, that's funny!

Zeropaid.com - Go ahead. Share. A good example that P2P can make your cds sale better. Go and learn RIAA lawyers!!!

Free software guru speaks on patents | The Register: "the component ideas in software are very similar to the building blocks of music. In the same way that a scale here and a chord there do not a symphony make, there is more to a word processor than a spell checker and a couple of font definitions."

Knoppix :: View topic - knoppix saved my ass!: "When my wifes HDD started to die, Knoppix was able to access all partitions when Mandrake 9.x, 10.x, could not, I salvaged data that allowed my marriage to continue (its allways my fault you know)."

hehe, that's funny :)

frontline: the way the music died | PBSexcerpts of that:

"what started with MTV and became about trying to sell a $16 CD based on three minutes of music, is what killed the album."

"The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died."

I got tired of reading that, it's very long. They also have videos ;)

How to Mod a MuVo 2

Photographs :: Spring :: 14

Bad Publicity, Good Publicity - The P2P Weblog - p2p.weblogsinc.com: I thought the same thing when Hollywood’s MPAA began placing anti-piracy ads in movie theaters. Watching my first one, I could sense the quickening interest of people around me: “What, you can download movies from the Internet? I’ve got to try this!”

Abu Ghraib: pictures and movies already popular on P2P networks

BBspot - Losing My Partition

The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide

brianstorms weblog: Where Have All The Users Gone?: "We here at Alexa have been watching the same trend for the last several years: International sites moving up in the rankings and other very popular US sites slowly dropping."

Popular Science | Take the Shackles Off Your Cellphone or how to unlock your cellphone

Scripting News: 5/28/2004: "Political Wire: 'Kerry is expanding the use of biographical ads to introduce himself, while President Bush is running negative ads to try to define his opponent first.'"

happened the same in Spain, Rajoy (follower of Aznar) forgot about himself and focused on Zapatero. We see the results ;)

It's the war, stupid

The first Bush went to war and forgot the economy, the second Bush goes to war and forgets the war.

eMulePlus Settings

about the Upload limits, probably the most important setting overall

More connections only increase the overhead a lot but might not always provide better speeds

Windows XP Home and Professional Service Configurations by Black Viper, looks very complete.

Blackmesa HL� by piloux ..::page made by Whabbit::..

The Decline of Fashion Photography | An argument in pictures. | By Karen Lehrman

Zeropaid.com - Survey shows most musicians oppose RIAA's lawsuits

Oxfam Enlists Music Downloaders to Fight Poverty, can anybody tell me what is Oxfam doing? Selling mp3 to fight poverty? One day they will 'discover' that guns sale better, and therefore, that's a better way to fight poverty.

Speakerless Speaker? I hope this thing spreads quickly :)

MAVROMATIC - Buy a Pirated CD. Go Directly To Jail. It's a crazy world in Greece.

Designtechnica News - Featured Article: LCD Resolution: When Bigger Is Actually Smaller

"most think that buying a larger [LCD] screen with a higher resolution will allow them to see their desktop as larger." the problem is that LCD screens work best at one specific resolution, often large enough so the final result is that everything looks smaller.

Annoyances.org - How many forum members does it takes to change a light bulb? incredible joke.

Lawrence Lessig: The only politician protected by IP.

Migration in-depth, part 1: Why Health First is dumping MS Office
"The biggest problem is going from a closed Microsoft Office platform to an open platform like OpenOffice. For instance, when you have Microsoft Office, the Web browser is integrated with everything in Office, so your standard links and your plug-ins with the Web browser are proprietarily written to look for just Microsoft Office. So, when we are rolling over to OpenOffice, some of the links on the Web pages don't work the RIGHT way because again Microsoft has you locked in. Once you use their browser and their OS, you have to use it their way or no way." So, you start using OpenOffice and end using Linux. That's bad news for Microsoft, isn't it?

Opinion: Longhorn Vs. Linux... Again - OSNews.com:

"let's say that Longhorn will run comfortably on a 3.0 gHz processor and somewhat uncomfortably on a 2.5 or 2.7.

Businesses don't like to spend money. New computers cost money. Therefore it makes sense to try and make the computers you have work. Using ten year old software simply won't cut, in terms of interoperability and just plain productivity.

The obvious answer to that is linux. With a light window manager and good software it will more than suffice."

nice 'skate'

the worst swis knife

Editorial: Not Everyone Understands the Patent Situation - OSNews.com "Patent transparency on a window, or patent a music player's UI, or patent a menu list that can hold different kind of objects? That's like patenting the fact that "1+1=2" and then you go out like a jerk and ask the poor guys to "pay up or come up with your own ideas and not copy that fact". How do you compete on a system that there is so much idiocy and lack of freedom on basic things?"

Wired News: New Spin on the Music Business: "Artists would first have to register their work with the copyright office, which would track how many times that work was downloaded. Revenue generated from taxes on things like Internet access and the sale of MP3 players would then be used to pay the artists."

Microsoft's Ballmer: US workforce should be paid less

Ars Technica: Nielsen Rating System points to possible deceit in RIAA sales figures great, now RIAA is not only a bunch of money hunter salesmen, but they also lie. Looks we have a trend, haven't we Mr. Bush?

TrustedReviews.: "but even the greatest fan of Serial ATA wouldn't claim that the new interface has any performance advantage, so you're paying extra for a slim cable, rather than a clunky old ribbon cable." <<-- that's good to know. I hope I can really trust them ;)

Slyck News - eDonkey/Overnet Rapidly Approaching FastTrack: "As FastTrack sits only 800,000 users ahead of the eDonkey2000/Overnet community, its days as the reigning king of file-sharing are certainly numbered. As the developers of eDoney2000/Overnet continue to refine and improve their network by introducing new technology, FastTrack has remained virtually unchanged since its inception."

New wave of secret file sharing breaks over Web - CD Freaks.com. First was Napster, RIAA killed it and something bigger was born afterwards. Now they want to kill eMule/KaZaA/etc and something even bigger will born. A big hurray for RIAA and their clever executives with clear ideas on how to stop piracy.

TrustedReviews: replacing pc "I would not spend the amount of money you have on a PC, but would rather spend in the region of £1000 and then save the rest for next year and get another £1000 PC then. Upgrading PCs is rapidly becoming something of the past, as with cost coming down all the time, upgrades are not quite worth it any more."

X-bit labs - Articles - Mega Roundup 2: Twenty Two Hard Disk Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity

80mm vs 120mm PSU fans. I am planning to buy a new PSU and I don't know whether to buy one with a single 80mm fan on back, one 120mm on bottom or dual 80mm fans (back&bottom).

Joi Ito's Web: EU planning to pass stupid software patent law without discussion

Neowin.net - Everyone get to upgrade to XP SP2 even cracked copies... Another reason internet is not like real world, or does anybody expect Ford to fix stolen cars for free?

Ars Technica: OWC Mercury 2.5" Firewire hard drive - Page 4 (3/2004)

Abit AN7 Review compared to NF7-S

Yahoo! News - CDs and DVDs Not So Immortal After All. That's why I moved to 'burn' hard disks. ;)

Mind the Gap: A Word of Difference (5/4/2004), detailed review of Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice/StarOffice. He's a writer not a generic reviewer. I got bored while reading his review though ;)

Short article about online frauds

TheTechLounge - Beyond Megapixels - Part I, short article explaining that a 8 megapixels camara might be worse than another of 6 megapixels

Three Years of Snooze Digital Snapshots <-- that really is a good idea! :)

A Silent Solution, nice experience on making silent a normal computer, testing every piece of changed material.

How to Choose a Digital Camera - Tips

X-bit labs - Hardware news - World's Largest HDD Makes it to Retail, 400GB!!

Yahoo! News - 'Passion' Demonstrates Peru Piracy Woes

Google's chastity belt too tight, or why the domain PartsExpress.com is blocked (partSEXpress). JewishSussex.com, a religious Web site, is unsafe for children lol!

Microsoft Notebook: Open source at Microsoft! here's the open-source project from Microsoft

Gizmodo: "When music is no longer bought, but licensed, paying a dollar a song is a shaky investment." good point

very nice, I logged in my blog and I was offered to have a gmail account. Let's see how this goes :)

Scubadoo Underwater Motorcycle

Busty Mousepad

Google doesn't want you to redistribute their news

Neowin.net - Microsoft Preparing to Release Code to Open Source

Beautiful Apple Store in San Francisco

Motorwheels monowheels

Renew your domain for 100 years for $999

US legislators move to make P2P a crime

Storage overload--it's a losing battle - News - ZDNet: "information is more than bits and bytes. Information is data in context: lose the context, and all you've got is gibberish and a full hard disk."

honest user trapped in Apple's DRM.

Intelligent Stick USB Drive Review incredibly thin usb drive!!

Excel as a database

Wired News: Record Stores: We're Fine, Thanks: "Paul Epstein, owner of Twist & Shout, a store in Denver, agreed that piracy has helped his bottom line. He said it's like radio, another form of promotion that spurs sales."

Wired News: Mass Extinction Not Inevitable

Japanese Facemarks(smileys). Japanese do vertical smileys while america draw them horizontally. Curious...

PC Cooling & Silencing... with a Cookie Jar! :: SilentPCReview.com curious read about a guy that placed his hdds inside a cookie jar with a fan and put this jar inside the computer.

USATODAY.com - Inexpensive USB gizmos, gadgets and trinkets abound

Ars Technica: OWC Mercury 2.5" Firewire hard drive

I bought an external enclosure for my 3.5 parallel hdd. And it was a good investment indeed.

NEWS.com.au | Your computer is dirtier than a toilet (March 12, 2004)

google force

Removing the MHz Myth, Again, intel is thinking of abandoning the MHz label.

Led Zeppelin - The Satanic Messages

Wired News: Last-Minute Satellite Turns 20, an amateur satellite runs since 1984

Chapapote Discursivo: Publicidad electoral en televisiones locales

DVD Cover Art Leaked (found in slashdot)

[Humor] Bush Kiss

The virus squad - Icon - smh.com.au, interesting read about viruses

IBM heeds message to integrate IM, e-mail | CNET News.com

ACM Queue - Game Development: Harder Than You Think - What makes you think that creating alternative worlds is all fun and games?

Wired News: Germans Protest Radio-ID Plans

Google bans environmental activists ads

Judge denies MS attempt to re-define 'card'. There's a company that has a patent on a "multi-function card" and the rest of the world has to pay to use *any* card that has multiple functions?

Wired News: The Answer to Piracy: Five Bucks?

New DiMAGE Xg camera from Konica Minolta, another short preview of that camara

Patents raise stakes in search wars | CNET News.com

Wired 12.03: The Complete Guide to Googlemania!

Forbes.com: The Coming RSS Revolution

MAP refund checks are rolling in to slighted CD customers - CD Freaks.com

Wired News: Grey Album Fans Protest Clampdown: "making money is a higher priority in the music industry than making music"

Beststuff - Konica Minolta Introduces 3.2 Megapixel DiMAGE Xg Digital Camera I wanted to buy the Xt, that article says Xg has an even faster startup, and makes better photos. I guess I buy this one ;)

wonkette: "two thirds of Americans believe executions should be televised." wow, america moves to middle age!

Wired News: RIAA's New Seal of Disapproval Great, the solution to piracy is a FBI seal on cds.

Looks like Fear is becoming a great business in USA.

Evaluating the Creative Commons Project Nice comparison of CC. I found it here

funferal: Actions of Joyce estate highlight problems with copyright law Another IP problem: Ireland will be sued if James Joyce's works are publicly read during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June.

The funny thing is that those works were public domain from 1991 until 1995, when EU extended copyright terms.

Bent Out of Shape: Can Yoga Methods be Copyrighted? a Yoga Master is sueing other schools and teachers for using his stretches.

New copy protected audio CDs in the UK have major compatibility issues - CD Freaks.com

DJ Danger Mouse - The Grey Album, download it here

EMI wants DJ Danger Mouse to destroy the Grey Album - CD Freaks.com

PCWorld.com - Where Do Old CRTs Go to Die?

Simpsons, the movie

Wired News: Copyright Enters a Gray Area: "Labels are saying, 'If you do (a remix) on the underground scene, it's OK. But if it's so compelling that people trade it all over the Internet, then we're going to sue you.'"

New lawsuit targets DVD copying

google fate

Flexbeta - 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE - Page 1

Microsoft: Oops! We Did It Again Great, six months to fix a critical bug.

"This is one of the most serious Microsoft vulnerabilities ever released,"

Court: eBay's off the hook over feedback "Be careful when reading feedback left in online auctions: eBay and similar Web sites are not required to remove information that's false or even libelous, a court has decided."

EU to criminalize P2P sharing? "European ISPs fear that individual consumers might be placed on the same level with criminals seeking commercial gain by counterfeiting products. Legal experts have expressed similar concerns, and many feel that a law that would criminalize private P2P use would go too far."

LinuxDevCenter.com: Why Run Free Software on a PDA?

iTunes sells silence

Duran i Lleida: "El que és una vergonya és que avui el president del govern estigui informant i compareixent davant del Congrés nord-americà, i no sigui capaç de comparèixer davant del Congrés espanyol".

curiós també que aquesta notícia estigui en el domini arturmas.com

elmundo.es - Cayetana Guillén Cuervo niega en un comunicado que mantenga una relación con el presidente Aznar: "Por ello, si el rumor sigue circulando, la abogada ejercerá "cuantas acciones civiles o penales se puedan derivar del hecho de que consciente de la falsedad de estos rumores, noticias o información."

Res millor que un comunicat oficial per donar vida a un rumor.

Lawrence Lessig: "So the lesson of BBC is that if you’re misleading about whether the government misled you into war, management must resign."

Lawrence Lessig: "CBS deliberately suppressed and censored political
speech and public discourse, the core reason
behind the First Amendment, yet saw fit to air
sexually exploitive performances during a family
event. We cannot tolerate such failures in
judgment."

Another Look at Mozilla

InfoWorld: Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise: January 30, 2004: By Paul Venezia: Platforms, explain changes between 2.4 and 2.6.

Overclockers Club - News: Get LindowsOS 4.5 FREE Today Only!

Do More with Less: Reasons why Windows 98 is still a good choice

Top five reasons to leave Windows 9x behind.

I personally still use win98se ;)

eBay item 3171575635 (Ends Jan-30-04 11:57:37 PST) - The Best Sr. Network/Security Engineer, another funny auction :)

major labels: the problem with music. This article explains how a band signs with a major and where does money end up. (hint: record label gets $700k and each band member $4k)

The Eagle Is Grounded, While America works to protect intellectual property, everyone else is innovating.

The MPAA and RIAA are even seeking permanent antitrust exemptions from Congress to more effectively defend against technology's inevitable progress.

By taking a flexible approach to IP, companies could capitalize on the next wave of innovation rather than shirk from it. But wait too long and this ship will have sailed.

Are Sporting Events Copyrightable?

Why I Hate Personal Weblogs

eBay - Mentadent Toothbrush, you never know what you'll find at eBay...

Wired News: RIAA Strikes Again at Traders"We're glad that the recording industry has agreed to play by the same rules that everyone else has to play by when they go to court, but it still doesn't solve any of the problems that the recording industry is facing. It doesn't put a single penny in the pockets of artists, and it says nothing about a business model that doesn't involve lawsuits." said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The electronic pony express, or WiFi in Cambodia.

Dean Goes Nuts

Tom's Hardware, The 5 GHz Project A Pentium IV at 5GHz cooled with Liquid Nitrogen. I guess they only did it to attract atention...

Han Solo in Carbonite, made with Lego bricks!!

Slashdot | Microsoft Patenting Office XML Formats

this says bookmarks are being abandoned because they become a mess the more you use them. It also says that new ways for revisiting web sites are on study. Anybody thought about blogs? I blog about sites I like, and favorites are for sites you like.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Why digital cameras are better photographers

Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp, Shoutcast, Waste...

Complete Article on what happened around RIAA.

Digital Secrets: How Spirit Makes Great Photos: 'The pixels themselves get smaller,' Myles said. 'This has an impact on image quality.'

Techfocus News & Commentary - Microsoft versus Mike Rowe Soft, Part I

Not a single ISP out of 50 wants to help RIAA in their sueing quest.
New RIAA plea for help is low on ISPs to do list - CD Freaks.com

Slashdot | What is the Best Way to Handle a GPL Violation?

Wired News: Bush Grabs New Power for FBI: Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to obtain records from financial institutions, nor does it need to prove just cause.

Neowin.net - Where unprofessional journalism looks better - HP Declares War On Sharing Culture: "technology leaders such as HP are going out of their way to 'help' the media industry instead of helping their own customers."

NTFS - Microsoft Aims MSN.com at Yahoo

microsoft lost 300M$ in 2003 and while they wanted to compete with AOL they focus on Yahoo now

Other Small Apps

a topic in miranda forums for those who like little programs, like me :)

Pie Menus, or how to use your mouse.

GROKLAW article to make lawyers understand Open Source.

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux., or how to use knoppix.

Scientists: Earth Travel Time on Schedule: "To make the world's official time agree with where the Earth actually is in space, scientists in 1972 started adding an extra ``leap second'' on the last day of the year.For 28 years"